Education is a key point of discussion during the 2020 crisis the World is facing. The world quickly moved on to online delivery of education. There are myriad of webinar platforms available ranging from Cisco WebEx, Zoom, Microsoft Teams Meeting and to Microsoft Live Events.
We had experimented with Cisco WebEx, Zoom, Microsoft Teams Meeting and some of the challenges we faced in handling webinars over 100 students is disturbances from the students during the lecture. In both Microsoft Teams Meeting and Cisco WebEx we couldn't fully mute all the students during the class and some accidentally interrupted the class. Our experience later with Zoom was much better as we had controls to prevent students from unmuting during the lecture.
However the version of Zoom we had was limited to 300 participants. SLIIT like most universities have Office 365 and Microsoft Teams is part of the software provided.
We had difficulty going beyond 300 students using the normal Microsoft Teams Meeting product. Even in classes less than 100 we couldn't prevent students hijacking the recording option and inadvertently disrupting the class.
Our experience with Microsoft Live Events had a steep learning curve but it was utterly rewarding in the end. Microsoft Live Events is a very different type of creature as the content is broadcast. It took some time to wrap our head around the fact that students see our live content after a 10 to 20 second delay. The major plus point was this platform scales upto 10,000 students.
The recorded video produced from Microsoft Live Events was of very high quality comparing to Microsoft Teams Meeting and even other webinar platforms we considered.
Microsoft has some excellent documentation on how to use Microsoft Live Events in their documentation What are Microsoft Teams Live Events ?
Our setup included a minimum of two people to support a simple webinar to a larger team supporting a more elaborate discussion style webinar.
Essentially you need a person as the producer whose main task is to control what the audience sees.
The screen above is what the producer sees. The window on the right is the live panel which is what the audience sees. The producer selects content from the bottom window and initially queues them on to the left top window. When it is time the producer sends items queued up (left window) to the live window (right window).
The main points of consideration of the producer is to decide on the fly one of the following views for a given presenter.
- Presenter Full Screen
- Screen Cast Full Screen
- Screen Cast with a small window of the presenter
The audience sees the live events with a 10 to 20 second delay. Since the content is broadcast the audience has a better experience even when there are connectivity issues.
There are challenges when you want to have interactivity in such sessions.
Some good resources to get you started with Microsoft Live Events.
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